At last, like a referee separating two weary prizefighters, Isidore Rothstein came out again. “I know you’ll all vote next month,” he told the crowd. “I expect you’ll vote the patriotic way.” Flora glared at the Democratic Party chairman. He had no business-no business but the business of politics-getting in a dig like that.
Now more like a corner man than a referee, Rothstein led Miller away. Flora had to go offstage by herself. Only when she was walking down the dark, narrow corridor to the dressing room did she fully realize what she’d done. Her feet seemed to float six inches above the filthy boards of the floor.
When she opened the door, Maria Tresca leaped out and embraced her. “It’s ours!” she exclaimed. “You did it!”
Right behind her, Herman Bruck agreed. “His face looked like curdled milk when you reminded people he has no personal stake in watching the war go on.”
“That stupid Democratic heckler gave me the opening I needed,” Flora said. “Rothstein must be throwing a fit in the other dressing room.”
Maria looked at Bruck. Bruck looked uncommonly smug, even for him. “That was no stupid Democrat. That was my cousin Mottel, and I told him what to say and when to say it.”
Flora stared at him, then let out a shriek, then kissed him on the cheek. “Shall we go out and have supper to celebrate?”
She thought she’d meant the invitation to include Maria, too, but Maria didn’t seem to think so. And Flora discovered she didn’t mind. Herman Bruck had just given her the congressional seat on a silver platter. If that didn’t deserve a dinner what did?
Besides, she always had her hatpin, if she felt like using it. Maybe she wouldn’t.
“We’ve got to hold this town, boys,” Lieutenant Jerome Nicoll said. “Below Waurika, there’s no more Sequoyah left, not hardly. There’s just the Red River, and then there’s Texas. The whole Confederacy is depending on us. If the damnyankees push over the river and into Texas, you can kiss Sequoyah good-bye when the war is done.”
“Wish I could kiss Sequoyah good-bye right now,” Reginald Bartlett muttered under his breath. “Wish I was back in Virginia.”
Napoleon Dibble gaped. “You wish you was back on the Roanoke front, Reggie?” He sounded as if he thought Bartlett was crazy.
Had Reggie wished that, he would have been crazy. “No. I wish I was back in Richmond, where I came from.” Dibble nodded, enlightened, or as enlightened as he got. Under his breath, Reggie went on, “The other thing I wish is that Lieutenant Nicoll would get himself a new speech.”
Nap Dibble didn’t hear him, but Sergeant Hairston did. “Yeah,” he said. “We got to hold this, we got to hold that. Then what the hell happens when we don’t hold? We supposed to go off and shoot ourselves?”
“If we don’t hold a place, the damnyankees usually shoot a lot of us,” Bartlett said, which made Pete Hairston laugh but which was also unpleasantly true. The regiment-the whole division-had taken a lot of casualties trying to halt the U.S. drive toward the Red River.
An aeroplane buzzed overhead. Reggie started to unsling his rifle to take a shot at it: it wasn’t flying very high, for gray clouds filled the sky. But it carried the Confederate battle flag under its wings. He stared at it in tired wonder. The USA didn’t have many aeroplanes out here in the West, but the CSA had even fewer.
Hoping it would do the damnyankees some harm, he forgot about it and marched on toward Waurika. The town’s business district lay in a hollow, with houses on the surrounding hills. “We’ll have to hold the Yanks up here,” he said, as much to himself as to anyone else. “We go down there into that bowl, we’re going to get pounded to death.”
As had been true up in Wilson Town, not all the civilians had fled from Waurika. Most of the men and women who came out of the houses to look over the retreating Confederates had dark skins: Waurika, Lieutenant Nicoll had said, was about half Kiowa, half Comanche. Reggie couldn’t have told one bunch from the other to save himself from the firing squad.
Some of the civilians had skins darker than copper: the Indians’ Negro servants. Most of those, or at least most of the ones Bartlett saw, were women. The men had probably been impressed into labor service already: either that or they’d run off toward the Yankees or toward the forests and swamps of the Red River bottom country, where a man who knew how to live off the land could fend for himself for a long time.
More than a few Indians, men wearing homespun and carrying hunting rifles, tried to fall in with the column of Confederate soldiers. “You braves don’t know what you’re getting into,” Lieutenant Nicoll told them. “This isn’t any kind of fighting you’ve ever seen before, and if the damnyankees catch you shooting at them without wearing a uniform, they’ll kill you for it.”
“What will the Yankees do to us if they take this land?” one of the Indians answered. “We do not want to be in the USA.”
“Our grandfathers have told us how bad the living was under the Stars and Stripes,” another Indian agreed. “We want to stay under the Stars and Bars.” He pointed toward the business section of Waurika, where several Confederate flags flew in spite of the threatening weather.
At that moment, the weather stopped threatening and started delivering chilly rain mixed with sleet. Shivering, Bartlett consoled himself with the thought that the rain would be harder on the Yankees, who would have to fight their way through it, than on his own unit, which had already reached the place it needed to defend.
Sergeant Hairston spoke in a low, urgent voice: “Sir, you can’t give them redskins any stretch of line to hold. They ain’t soldiers.”
“We are warriors,” one of the Indians said proudly. “The tribes in the east of Sequoyah have their own armies allied to the Stars and Bars.”
“I’ve heard about that,” Nicoll said. “Isn’t anything like it hereabouts, though.” He scowled, visibly of two minds. At last, he went on, “You want to fight?” The Indians gathered round him made it loudly clear they did indeed want to fight. He held up a hand. “All right. This is what we’ll do. You go out in front of the line we’ll hold. You snipe at the damnyankees and bring us back word of what they’re doing and how they’re moving. Don’t let yourselves get captured. You get in trouble, run back to the front. Is it a bargain?”
“We know this country,” one of the Indians answered. “The soldiers in the uniforms the color of horse shit will not find us.” The rest of the men from Waurika nodded, then trotted quietly north, in the direction from which the U.S. soldiers would come.
Reggie turned to Nap Dibble. “The damnyankees may not find ’em, but what about machine-gun bullets? I don’t care how brave or how smart you are, and a machine gun doesn’t care, either.” He spoke with the grim certainty of a man who had been through the machine-gun hell of the Roanoke River valley.
All Nap Dibble knew was the more open fighting that characterized the Sequoyah front. No: he knew one thing more. “Better them’n us,” he said, and, taking out his entrenching tool, began to dig in.
Along with using the Indians of Waurika as scouts and snipers, Lieutenant Nicoll used the few Negro men left in town as laborers. None of the Indian women and old men left behind objected. No one asked the Negroes’ opinions. With shovels and hoes and mattocks, they began helping the Confederate soldiers make entrenchments in the muddy ground.
Once there were holes in which the men of Nicoll’s company could huddle, the lieutenant set the blacks to digging zigzag communications trenches back toward a second line. “Lawd have mercy, suh,” one of them said, “you gwine work us to death.”